A Yonkers contractor claims that an office equipment supplier has refused to cancel a photocopier deal.
Ecker Window Corp. accused De Lage Landen Financial Services Inc. and Atlantic, Tomorrow’s Office of deceptive practices, in a complaint filed on May 7 in Westchester Supreme Court.
“Defendants conspired to create a rouse intended to trick Ecker into paying them more money,” the complaint states, “by maintaining the fiction that the lease was not cancelled and [had] renewed for an additional term at the end of December 2023.”
Ecker says it has operated as a family-owned business since 1947 and is one of the largest and oldest window contractors in the region.
De Lage, an equipment and assets financing business headquartered in the Netherlands, and Atlantic, an equipment supplier with an office in Tarrytown, are partners, according to the complaint.
Ecker has done business with Atlantic for about 20 years, and as of last year it was leasing a Toshiba photocopier and a Ricoh wide format photocopier.
CEO Howard Ecker decided to switch to another vendor that had made a better offer. In April 2023, he notified Atlantic sales manager Jeff Mann that he was terminating the lease, the complaint states, and he asked for an equipment return authorization and a final invoice.
The new vendor removed the old photocopiers last spring but De Lage and Atlantic, according to the complaint, did not give Ecker an equipment return authorization or a final invoice.
Ecker continued making monthly payments through the end of the 2023 lease, the complaint states. After the lease had purportedly expired in December, Ecker kept receiving invoices.
This past April, a De Lage attorney allegedly told Ecker that the lease could not be cancelled and had renewed. Then Ecker discovered that the new vendor had not returned the old photocopiers to Atlantic because it had not received a return authorization, the complaint states.
Ecker claims that De Lage and Atlantic prevented the old photocopiers from being returned and refused to issue a final invoice, knowing that Ecker would continue making monthly payments as if the lease was still in effect.
Atlantic sales manager Jeff Mann did not reply to an email asking for his side of the story.
Ecker is asking the court for a judgment declaring that the photocopier lease was cancelled in April 2023 and stating that everything has been paid in full.
